“For if you know what you want, and will be content with it, you can be trusted. But if you do not know, your desires are limitless and no one can tell how to deal with you. Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.”
― The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
― The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
“What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all.”
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“What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins" for real things.”
― The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
― The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
― The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
― The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
“Where there is to be creative action, it is quite beside the point to discuss what we should or should not do in order to be right or good. A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting perversely just to prove its independence. Its interest is not in itself, but in the people and problems of which it is aware; these are “itself.” It acts, not according to the rules, but according to the circumstances of the moment, and the “well” it wishes to others is not security but liberty.”
― The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
― The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
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